How Trump Betrays ‘Forgotten’ Americans

Mr. Greenhouse is a former labor and workplace reporter for the Times.

Sept. 3, 2018

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Members of the American Postal Workers Union in Maryland protesting President Trump's efforts to privatize the Postal Service.CreditCreditLake Fong/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via Associated Press

Donald Trump promotes himself as a friend of “forgotten” workers, but in ways large and small his administration has undermined what has traditionally been the biggest champion of workers: labor unions.

Most recently, he used his authority as president to deliver a harsh Labor Day message to the 2.1 million people who work for him, canceling pay raises for the civilian employees of the federal government. In May, he issued three executive orders to weaken federal employees’ unions by, among other things, limiting the subjects they can bargain over. (On Aug. 25, a judge ruled that this move violated federal law.) In March 2017, Mr. Trump signed a law repealing an executive order signed by President Obama that sought to keep the federal government from awarding contracts to companies that violate laws protecting workers’ right to unionize, as well as wage and job safety laws.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has installed a conservative majority on the National Labor Relations Board that has moved quickly to make it harder for unions to organize. Last December, the board overturned a rule, beloved by unions, that made it easier to organize smaller units of workers in big factories and stores. In another board decision, his appointees made it tougher for workers at fast-food restaurants and other franchised operations to unionize, although that “joint employer” ruling was vacated when a labor board member later recused himself because of a conflict of interest. The board is also looking to slow down unionization elections, a move that unions oppose because it would give corporations more time to pressure workers to vote against unionizing.

Mr. Trump’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, was the deciding vote in a case that delivered this year’s biggest blow to workers. In Janus v. AFSCME, the court’s conservative majority, in a 5-to-4 vote, ruled in June that government employees can’t be required to pay any fees to the unions that bargain for them. By allowing many government workers to become “free riders,” that ruling is expected to chop revenues to many public employee unions by one-tenth to one-third.

With private-sector unions badly weakened by factory shutdowns and corporate resistance to unions, government employee unions have become the most powerful part of the labor movement. That’s one reason anti-union billionaires and foundations underwrote the Janus litigation: to hobble the strongest part of labor. The Koch brothers and other billionaires have seized on Janus to finance efforts, through emails and door-to-door canvassing, to urge government workers — teachers, police, firefighters, social workers and many others — to quit their unions and stop paying union fees.

It doesn’t look as if Mr. Trump’s latest nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, will be a friend to workers or unions. In an astonishingly anti-worker opinion in a case involving a SeaWorld trainer killed by an orca whale, Mr. Kavanaugh wrote in 2014 that the Labor Department was wrong to fine SeaWorld. Dissenting in a 2-to-1 case, he suggested that the Labor Department should not “paternalistically” regulate the safety of SeaWorld’s trainers because they, like tiger tamers and bull riders, were sports and entertainment figures who accepted the risk of injury in hazardous businesses that usually regulated their own dangers. His opinion had echoes of 19th-century state court rulings that factory workers assumed the risk of injuries from machinery that cut off their hands.

Labor unions might get a boost from Mr. Trump’s efforts to increase coal, steel and aluminum production and from his push to renegotiate Nafta to spur domestic auto production. The Trump administration and many unions hope those moves will bring back tens of thousands of mining and manufacturing jobs. That could lift unions’ ranks, but those gains would be a fraction of the losses expected from Janus. Some experts estimate that more than a million workers will quit their unions over the next few years as a result of that ruling.

There has been some good news for labor. A new Gallup Poll found that public approval for unions has reached its highest level in 15 years. Unions have scored some significant victories recently, especially among white collar workers: adjunct professors at many universities have unionized, and so have journalists at The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The New Yorker, HuffPost and Slate, and graduate teaching assistants at Harvard, Columbia, Brandeis and other universities. There have also been unionization gains among nurses and bus drivers as well as service-sector workers in Silicon Valley.

The labor movement in the United States is already far weaker than in any other major industrialized nation. Just one in 10 American workers belongs to a union, down from more than one in three in the 1950s. But in the face of decades of fierce employer resistance, compounded by the Trump administration’s hostility, unions are not making the gains they need to reverse their decline. If America’s unions don’t rebound, that will most likely mean even more income inequality and wage stagnation and even more control of the levers of power by corporations and wealthy donors.

Steven Greenhouse was a labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times for 19 years. He is writing a book about the history and future of the American labor movement.